Any vendor out there willing to sell high priced carnivorous plants at a lower price to drive the industry price down? It'd be nice if this market gets some fierce competition driving average price down.
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High priced carnivorous plants
- Thread starter ps3isawesome
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mato
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Start a commercial tissue culture lab and you can be the industry savior.
any idea what the total industry sales was for the past several years? I'm interested in collecting more information about this industry. I graduate next semester and will have several projects involving analysis of existing business models and building actual business plans. Who knows, what will happen considering I live near a bunch of venture capitalist firms. I mean one of the reason why I went to business school is to eventually start my own business. I'd much rather be involved with something I love and am actually a member of the community I serve.
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mato
BANNED
Ok. 
I realize you're working on a business degree at the moment, but I'm not sure how you'd expect people to know this. To my knowledge, there are no analysts following the CP "industry," and as it is a global hobby that likely has less reported sales than not, I would assume that a ballpark figure would be very difficult to come up with accurately. Let's just say, the people who rely on these plants as their sole source of income are just getting by, with perhaps one or two exceptional cases.
I realize you're working on a business degree at the moment, but I'm not sure how you'd expect people to know this. To my knowledge, there are no analysts following the CP "industry," and as it is a global hobby that likely has less reported sales than not, I would assume that a ballpark figure would be very difficult to come up with accurately. Let's just say, the people who rely on these plants as their sole source of income are just getting by, with perhaps one or two exceptional cases.
Ya, that was my assumption too. I'll prob ask for an interview from the local nurseries and start from some general research and exploratory data analysis. There is a local one that's pretty successful.
I think the real issue is that the people with the high $$ plants simply do not wish to sell them. If you have the $$ to buy/trade for those plants in the first place it is equally likely you don't need the funds. Once these plants get out in the market the prices tend to tank unless they are hard/slow to grow.
Packing and shipping plants is not as easy as many think. Anything less than $25-50 a plant is really not worth my time to pack/ship.
I just don't see a CP nursery as a real money maker, a hobby that pays for itself sure. Back when Utric. graminifolia was in high demand I sold off enough of it to expand my grow area massively. In the process I tanked the market.
The Ceph market is currently getting tanked unless they are special.
Packing and shipping plants is not as easy as many think. Anything less than $25-50 a plant is really not worth my time to pack/ship.
I just don't see a CP nursery as a real money maker, a hobby that pays for itself sure. Back when Utric. graminifolia was in high demand I sold off enough of it to expand my grow area massively. In the process I tanked the market.
The Ceph market is currently getting tanked unless they are special.
The problem with your idea is that most of the businesses that sell CPs are not making that much of a profit off of each plant by the time it sells from what I've heard. Most of the plants CP vendors sell are imported from places such as BE, EP, or MT. If you look at their wholesale prices they're paying what maybe $10 a plant on average. They also have to pay for shipping costs, the different soil mixes for potting up the plants when they arrive, the pots they go in, the water to water them, the heating unit/ac unit to cool and heat their grow space, fertilizer, electricity for lights, etc. The price per plant goes way up. While in school the current research said that when selling plants retail, to guarantee you make a profit you should take the wholesale price and multiply by 8 and thats the price the consumer should pay. Granted thats to give you a minimum of 200% return. All the nurseries I order from are completely reasonable on their pricing especially considering the rarity of most of the plants they're selling. Asking them to lower their prices is like asking them to give up making a profit and to just break even so that their customers can pay less, no sane business owner would ever consider such a thing.
On another note, I tanked the Nepenthes 'Rokko' market by doing a massive giveaway of cuttings where I just asked people to pay the cost of shipping and now I have 15 plants that I'm trying sell and I can't find a buyer (not trying to advertise selling my plants just making a point).
On another note, I tanked the Nepenthes 'Rokko' market by doing a massive giveaway of cuttings where I just asked people to pay the cost of shipping and now I have 15 plants that I'm trying sell and I can't find a buyer (not trying to advertise selling my plants just making a point).
I suspect that often among sellers it is understood that new and rare species represent a bubble that will soon pop so they get the money they can while they can. If the price is too high in a grower's mind then they can wait and it will likely come down with time. Of course plants that are hard to grow or difficult to propagate may not follow this model. I would argue that for many large-scale cp retailers this isn't where most of the money is. They do most of their business dealing with newer growers selling them more common and more easily grown species. As for the rarer/new species, sellers are causing the prices to drop all the time through increased propagation. When the market is so limited it isn't hard to saturate it. Many of the plants we now take for common and easy were once considered rare and difficult to grow.
Having said that, I do understand the desire to have and grow that awesome new species that I keep seeing photos of online. I am guessing all of us here do. Building one's growing abilities, credibility and circle of contacts and friends in the hobby seems to me to be the way to make it happen. But if you get the chance to buy the plant and you have the ability to grow it, that works too.
Having said that, I do understand the desire to have and grow that awesome new species that I keep seeing photos of online. I am guessing all of us here do. Building one's growing abilities, credibility and circle of contacts and friends in the hobby seems to me to be the way to make it happen. But if you get the chance to buy the plant and you have the ability to grow it, that works too.
Citing only Nepenthes, I have to point out that the $$$ seed-grown plants available to us may have taken 5 years or more to grow to a sell-able size! Sometimes its even more than that. Tissue culturing this genus is just as costly and time consuming. I'm just saying that its unrealistic to expect a plant that too YEARS to produce would ever be sold for the same prices as Flytraps and seedling Sarracenia. Most other CPs can be had for under $20, and I don't consider that expensive at all.
Growing Nepenthes is always going to be a rich man's game.
Growing Nepenthes is always going to be a rich man's game.
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I second Whimgrinder's opinion.
The time and the electricity bill it took to grow the plants sometimes justifies the price, this is not like growing grass I mind you.
This is an expensive hobby (like many other hobbies I'm sure), so if one's not serious enough to be willing to pay for the conditions/plants, he/she should consider dropping out or sticking with the easier growing ones.
The time and the electricity bill it took to grow the plants sometimes justifies the price, this is not like growing grass I mind you.
This is an expensive hobby (like many other hobbies I'm sure), so if one's not serious enough to be willing to pay for the conditions/plants, he/she should consider dropping out or sticking with the easier growing ones.
For the few of us who do Nepenthes tissue culture, it is not a speedy or cheap process
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Dexenthes
Aristoloingulamata
I don't think there are many people that do notable research on the business/economics aspect of the carnivorous plant industry. I imagine that if you were to try and crunch those figures yourself you would be one of the few people who ever thought to try.
The price of carnivorous plants is constantly going down, slowly but surely. The size of the market makes it such that it is very easy to change the demand and price for a type of plant even just from an individual's standpoint. The more people that join the hobby as time goes on, the more likelihood there is of people cloning, breeding, propagating and spreading the plants around and that is what slowly dwindles the price of certain plants.
Even N. edwardsiana - for instance, has gone down in price. When I first started growing CP's it was unfathomable to consider that you could ever buy one. The rare specimen that would make it onto ebay would have gone for close to if not over 1000 dollars. Then Wistuba started selling them for just a few hundred dollars.. Now you can look on ebay and see poached specimen for a couple hundred dollars as well... My point is the plant went from priceless/unavailable to ludicrously priced and more readily available. That's a price drop in my mind.
Heck you hear some old timers talk about when they were first trying to get their hands on a Nepenthes of any kind, it wasn't easy or cheap to get even a N. ventricosa! Now look at it, they are everywhere.
Just keep growing, cloning, trading, giving, breeding. We are the carnivorous plant industry.
The price of carnivorous plants is constantly going down, slowly but surely. The size of the market makes it such that it is very easy to change the demand and price for a type of plant even just from an individual's standpoint. The more people that join the hobby as time goes on, the more likelihood there is of people cloning, breeding, propagating and spreading the plants around and that is what slowly dwindles the price of certain plants.
Even N. edwardsiana - for instance, has gone down in price. When I first started growing CP's it was unfathomable to consider that you could ever buy one. The rare specimen that would make it onto ebay would have gone for close to if not over 1000 dollars. Then Wistuba started selling them for just a few hundred dollars.. Now you can look on ebay and see poached specimen for a couple hundred dollars as well... My point is the plant went from priceless/unavailable to ludicrously priced and more readily available. That's a price drop in my mind.
Heck you hear some old timers talk about when they were first trying to get their hands on a Nepenthes of any kind, it wasn't easy or cheap to get even a N. ventricosa! Now look at it, they are everywhere.
Just keep growing, cloning, trading, giving, breeding. We are the carnivorous plant industry.
thanks for everyone's input, it's really insightful
I don't believe it's really economically feasible for any grower in North America to make a profit on Nepenthes. Land costs in CA are prohibitive, while in the rest of the country it's the heating/cooling costs. It doesn't surprise me in the least that the biggest growers are overseas in the tropics. Domestic "growers" are essentially middlemen, who resell what they buy wholesale.
Remember, for example, the well-known Nepenthes grower last winter whose greenhouses froze? One irreversible night of error. That risk isn't present in Sri Lanka. I do wonder if there will/have been any attempts to set up a Nepenthes facility in Florida, Mexico or South America.
For other CPs that have generally high-ish prices, there are significant horticultural hurdles that may never be overcome. For example, slow growth and long maturation times. Then specialized dormancy periods, resistance to tissue culture, etc.
And in order to break the prices at a significant level, you have to do something on an epic scale like this. Those kinds of "factories," horrifying as I find them as a professional horticulturist who prefers the "hands-on" aspect of his discipline, are the reason the price was broken on Phalaenopsis.
Remember, for example, the well-known Nepenthes grower last winter whose greenhouses froze? One irreversible night of error. That risk isn't present in Sri Lanka. I do wonder if there will/have been any attempts to set up a Nepenthes facility in Florida, Mexico or South America.
For other CPs that have generally high-ish prices, there are significant horticultural hurdles that may never be overcome. For example, slow growth and long maturation times. Then specialized dormancy periods, resistance to tissue culture, etc.
And in order to break the prices at a significant level, you have to do something on an epic scale like this. Those kinds of "factories," horrifying as I find them as a professional horticulturist who prefers the "hands-on" aspect of his discipline, are the reason the price was broken on Phalaenopsis.
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75 thousand plants a week!
75 thousand of those die a week, have you seen these plants at your local chain stores....1/2 dead for $1...Hybrid Phal are just about the easiest orchid you could possibly grow and still they die by the thousands in these stores. Producing that many easy to care for Phals, and the US not being overran by these plants simply means they are getting killed or someone is hording them!
They did the same thing with a few of the CPs, think death cube...not a route we want to encourage.
Just imagine a massive factory producing some rare Nep by the thousands and your local chain hardware store selling it for $25...It would be dead before the Christmas trees die in there care.
They did the same thing with a few of the CPs, think death cube...not a route we want to encourage.
Just imagine a massive factory producing some rare Nep by the thousands and your local chain hardware store selling it for $25...It would be dead before the Christmas trees die in there care.
While I agree in the sense that I hate seeing life made expendable, think also of the species that have been taken from the brink of extinction or rarity by tissue culture. Despite the downside being that it doesn't do a good job at preserving genetic diversity, artificial propagation has enormous conservation potential. I'm thinking of things like Dionaea (I don't think anyone can argue it'd have been poached to death long ago without the death cubes) as well as the most recent discoveries of Heliamphora and Nepenthes species. Things can go from being completely unknown to science to being in the hands of collectors in a matter of years. That is just unheard-of for most of human history. While as a society we don't get everything right, this is one of the things we can use to benefit nature rather than simply ourselves.
Here's another anecdote. I have many gardening friends who started loving plants because they came across a half-dead plant on clearance. Sometimes an orchid, a flytrap, african violet, japanese maple, and so forth. No prior knowledge; just the fact that it was cheap encouraged them to try it. I think it'd also be worth taking a poll to see how many of us in this hobby started off with a death cube flytrap!
